About us

The Swedish Network for Family and Kinship Studies is a a multi-disciplinary initiative, the purpose of which is to function as a joint platform for scholars with interests in exploring close personal relationships, kinship and the family; the meanings, boundaries, shifts and continuities in family and kinship; and the ways in which family and kinship are linked to power relations and maintained or disrupted by cultural values, social practices, symbolic representations, or technological innovations with an impact on the ways in which people are born, live their lives, become parents. We are interested in exploring and developing critical perspectives on close personal relationships, family, and kinship, historically as well as in the present and future.

We are historians, anthropologists, sociologists, literary, legal, and gender studies scholars, ethicists and philosophers, theologians, political scientists, and more. It is our hope that this network will contribute to critical exchange across disciplinary and other boundaries and help create opportunities for collaborative work. This webpage will present information about the members of the network, ongoing research projects, and relevant forthcoming events. The name of the network should be read as denoting scholars who are (at least partly) based at Swedish research institutions; hence, the network is not limited to research on family/kinship in Sweden, but includes international and transnational scholarship.

The Network meetings rotate between universities. An initial meeting was held at Uppsala in 2014, subsequent meetings have been held at Södertörn (2015), Linköping (2016) and Umeå (spring 2017) and Göteborg (fall 2017). An international conference is planned for October 24-26, 2018, at Uppsala University.